GREEN ENERGY AND GLOBAL WARMING

Energy Matters today from the American Energy Society's 19August2024 issue:

• 
  Global warming remediation.
• Seems awfully expensive, but the largest Direct Air Capture and Storage of Carbon Dioxide, 36,000 tons of CO2/year, is the plant at Mammoth in Hellisheioi, Iceland.
• The biggest one in the U.S. was launched this month in Northern Oklahoma.  5.000 tons/year.
• Said to cost $200 per metric ton, about the highest of all the options.
• Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) can cost today as low as $50/ton.
• However, this "low" cost would still increase electricity cost by 5 cents/kilowatt-hour in a coal-fed powerplant.
• Implementation is increasing, but very slowly, because there is still no carbon tax.

• Industry is experimenting and will not move forward unless real decisions are made to combat global warming.  
• Cost prohibits any use at home, so applications range from heavy industry to natural gas processing to hydrogen production.
• CCS is especially necessary in synthetic fuel production for transport use. Then there are other ways to reduce CO2 emissions that can cost less than $20/ton.  These are linked to public transit and electric vehicles.

• This is why wind and solar power are cited as the lowest-cost ways to produce electricity, because there is no carbon dioxide problem.  
• Last year, 47,000 Europeans died from heat.  2.302 in the USA.  Greece led with 393 deaths/million population.
• This is the equivalent 3 million total deaths for the world.
• My contention is that needed decisions to reverse global heating will not be made unless tens of millions die one hot summer.  Thus, what happened in Greece last summer has to be multiplied by at least ten for the decision-makers to get serious.  Morbidly, I've been waiting for a couple of decades.
• 
  Utah FORGE (Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy) is exploring the potential of hot dry rock geothermal.
• Their networked geothermal system is extremely efficient, for their coefficient of performance score is COP6, meaning, for every unit energy going in, you get six units of heat our.  In comparison, gas furnaces have a COP of less than 1.
• I was part of the original Hawaii Geothermal Project in the early to mid 1970s, a half a century ago, that explored for, drilled and found the hottest geothermal well in the world then.  We produced around 3 MW of electricity and built an industrial park linked to the effluent of the powerplant.  During that period I also looked closely at utilizing heat from volcanoes...not the lava, but the nearby hot rock.  Read this posting of five years ago. 
• In that article, I showed where traditional geothermal energy was being produced.  Here is how much this has changed in four years.  Only a gain of one large nuclear power plant for the entire world.

• 
  In 2022, a California lab made a key breakthrough: a fusion reaction that produced more energy than was consumed. That result is known as “ignition,” or net energy gain, and the team replicated the experiment in July, 2023. As a consequence, public and private investment in fusion increased, from $300M in 2020 to $1.2B at the end of 2022, led by Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Peter Thiel.
• 
  Watch that video of the achievement in 2022.  Here are more details.
• It was about half a century ago when I worked at that California lab, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on laser fusion.  Early on, these were the days of Watergate and resignation of President Richard Nixon.  I left to work in the U.S. Senate, and wrote the original bill for hydrogen.  I never returned to LLNL because I thought the laser to accomplish commercial fusion was nowhere near to being developed.  That net energy gain recently attained in itself was fabulous and a significant breakthrough.  However, commercialization probably still remains half a century away because that needed laser still has not been invented.
• Note that there are two kinds of fusion, inertial confinement as at Livermore, and magnetic confinement at the Cadarache facility in southern France. called ITER.  The problem?

Dreamed up in the 1980s, the ITER collaboration came together in 2006. Construction began in 2010 with contracts spread across all the member states. Operations were expected to start about a decade later. The project relies on a doughnut-shaped reactor, called a tokamak, in which magnetic fields contain a plasma of hydrogen nuclei hot enough to fuse and release energy. Particle beams and microwaves heat the plasma to 150 million degrees Celsius—10 times the temperature of the Sun’s core—while a few meters away the superconducting magnets must be cooled to –269°C, a few degrees above absolute zero.

• 
  ITER could reach net positive in 15 years at a cost as high as $65 billion.  But who is counting, for the International Space Station has done essentially nothing at a cost of $150 billion, is currently holding two stranded U.S. astronauts and others, and will crash into the ocean in 2031.  Commercialization?  ITER has cost around $30 billion so far.  No one mentions with confidence when their ignition point will be attained.  I still think that the laser confinement option in the U.S. makes more sense than the one in Europe.
•  For the first time ever, wind generation exceeded coal-fired generation in March and then set another record in April.  Wind overtook coal in Europe earlier this year.  Further:

The U.S. has more than 74,500 wind turbines, and about 3,000 new turbines have been built every year since 2005. Wind power remains a relatively small part of broader U.S. energy production — 10.2% in 2023, according to the Energy Information Administration — behind natural gas (43.1%) and nuclear (18.6%), but makes up almost half of all renewable energy production.

Developing more wind power has been touted as a major part of the multipronged renewable energy push meant to put the U.S. on track to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels. Offshore wind has been a crucial part of those efforts because it has more potential to generate energy than onshore wind. Offshore projects are usually larger, and ocean winds tend to be stronger.

However, offshore wind electricity is expensive, around four times the price of wind farms on land.

U.S. utility-scale electricity generation by source, amount, and share of total in 2023

Energy source	Billion kWh	Share of total
Total - all sources	4,178
Fossil fuels (total)	2,505	60.0%
Natural gas	1,802	43.1%
Coal	675	16.2%
Petroleum (total)	16	0.4%
Petroleum liquids	12	0.3%
Petroleum coke	5	0.1%
Other gases3	11	0.3%
Nuclear	775	18.6%
Renewables (total)	894	21.4%
Wind	425	10.2%
Hydropower	240	5.7%
Solar (total)	165	3.9%
Photovoltaic	162	3.9%
Solar thermal	3	0.1%
Biomass (total)	47	1.1%
Wood	31	0.8%
Landfill gas	8	0.2%
Municipal solid waste (biogenic)	6	0.1%
Other biomass waste	2	0.1%
Geothermal	16	0.4%
Pumped storage hydropower4	-6	-0.1%
Other sources5	10	0.2%
Data source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, Electric Power Monthly, February 2024; preliminary data -